Ayn Rand

Deal Breaker: Ayn Rand

“Now let’s get this straight….Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run…. The government should be concerned only with those issues which involve the use of force…the police, the armed services, and the law courts to settle disputes among men. Nothing else.”

Why is Ayn Rand a Deal Breaker?

The founder of what her followers have called the “philosophy of objectivism,” Rand preached a gospel of rational selfishness in her quasi-philosophical novels and other works (if you want a primer, read this).  After years of waning influence, the financial crisis has made Ayn Rand a hot item again.  Her book sales are “through the roof.”  In the first half of 2009, Penguin books sent 300,000 copies of “Atlas Shrugged” alone to bookstores — 25 percent more than it printed in all of 2008.  A miniseries is in the works.  Biz-school students love her.  And every new employee at BB&T, one of the country’s top 20 biggest banks, gets a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” on the first day of work.  In an era when the right-wing machine is scaring us about deficit spending and soaring health care costs, selfish is sexy again.

What she (and her supporters) have said:

Of charity, Rand once told Playboy, “I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them….I am fighting…the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”  Recently, Ayn Rand Institute President Yaron Brook called the New Deal era and its legacy “an orgy of placing need above wealth creation, above personal pursuit of happiness.”  And an Ayn Rand Institute author simply states, “Rent control is immoral.”

Who is taking her on?

University of Chicago’s Brian Leiter  told the Times, “To describe her as a minor figure in the history of philosophical thinking about knowledge and reality would be a wild overstatement…She’s irrelevant.”….Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls her work “a great leap of ideological blindness”….Center for American Progress Economist Heather Boushey says, ”What I find so remarkable about it is if capitalism can work on its own without any government regulation, then we wouldn’t be here.”….and even Alan Greenspan is rethinking things: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity — myself, especially — are in a state of shocked disbelief,” Greenspan told a congressional hearing last fall.